Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who views the Arab world with a clever pro-Israel eye, is wrong when he asserts that “the world is flat.”

The world may be flat from the perspective of American domination, but for the rest of the world, especially for its Arab part, the globalized world is a steep hill.

Worse, a one-way street runs up its side with the Americans on top dropping down their services, retail franchises, thought control, while the Arab and other Third World nations rest at the bottom of this endless slope.

I saw the truth when I visited Dubai, a nation recently characterized in the American media as a haven for terrorism, a threat to world security and an inappropriate economic partner to manage America’s six seaside ports, including one in New York, the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Ironically, even the analogy of the hill versus a flat world is inaccurate and really the result of self-imprisoning perceptions driven by the American and Western news media.

I was warned by other Americans that the Arab world has no sense of humor, it is consumed with violence and that I would not be safe in Dubai. These are all common messages expressed routinely in the American media and society.

The truth is that Dubai, one of emirates in the United Arab Emirates of the easterly point of the Arabian Peninsula along the Gulf, is a better place than the United States.

Dubai is a symbol of everything that the Arab world can be without embracing the American theory of “Democracy by military occupation.” The Arabs of Dubai have about as much freedom as they can handle. It’s not the equivalent of American democracy and has faults. But even American democracy has faults, too, that the American news media pretends do not exist.

Dubai has more wealth per square foot than all of the United States. If we honestly compared Dubai to, say, Manhattan, the New York island of affluence and arrogance, would be a silk-tie version of “Best Buy,” the populist American retail electronic merchandise giant, and Dubai would be Chanel.

Ugly perceptions and stereotypes driven by the Western media, mainly in the United States, cloud the vision of Dubai outside of its emerald oceanfronts, posh commercial centers and luxury hotels.

Yet Dubai has very little real crime. The country’s main problem is that it has more work than it can hand out to its own indigenous nationals. More than 60 percent of the population is from Asia, the single largest group of workers are Indians who are not working behind curtains at telephone service banks out-sourced by American corporations.

Its population is internationally cosmopolitan. During my stand-up comedy performance there, I noted that I was pleased to visit Dubai. I always wanted to see India.

And I was awed by the beauty and form of the golden cranes. Not the Whopping Cranes, but the construction cranes. Dubai has more construction cranes per square mile than any other country in the world. In three years, the emirate has exploded with enormous buildings, new hotels and retail stores, industry and tourism. Dubai is determined to turn the phrase “biggest and largest” into a cliché.

In the past few years, Dubai has built the largest in-door ski slope in the world, nearly 20 stories tall with man-made snow that rivals the chill I find every winter in Chicago.

The slope is next to the world’s largest indoor shopping mall, the Mall of the Emirates, a behemoth three-story maze of more than 700 stores. Not just any stores but the retail icons of world luxury.

Hotels are crawling up to the sky at a frenzied pace. The Kempinski hotel where I stayed near the ski slope and mall only opened weeks ago, and has an opulence that is only modest compared to its rivals, but that puts most American hotels to shame.

And although the luxury blends easily with the less affluent — rich, middle class and poor seem to thrive side-by-side, there is another aspect often distorted in the American media.

Islamic culture lives in an atmosphere of dutiful respect to the trends, beliefs and customs, good and bad, of the West. Women completely covered in the softer version of the harsh “burqa,” walk next to women barely clothed, sporting the latest in Western fashion. Dubayans are irritated by the American rejection of the port deal, but they are not upset enough to do anything.

Because they don’t need the United States.

The fact is that right next to the popular locally franchised Arabian restaurants like “Zaatar w Zeitoun” are nearly every American-based franchise operation from Star Bucks to Applebees. And while Americans may frown on Arabian culture, believing their lifestyle is the best, the truth is the American-based businesses are fiercely competing for Arab dollars with an obeisance not seen in American malls.

The hypocrisies do exist among Western commerce, however. Just look at the separate advertising campaigns being promoted in the West to promote the BMW Mini Cooper and its rival strategies in the Arab world.

In the West, the theme is one that appeals to the growing anger against anything Arab. One advertising campaign boasts arrogantly, “OPEC SchmOPEC ... buy the BMW Mini Cooper.”

Yet in the Middle East, BMW deceitfully wishes Arabs to embrace the Mini as a convenience, portraying the car in one advertisement as a line of Mini Coopers viewed from the sky with each car sporting the flag of a country from the Arab world.

What’s the real message here? The advertising spin-meisters recognize that the only real difference between the Arab and the Western worlds is arrogance and indignation.

One day the people of the Arab world will wake up to discover that they don’t need the United States or the Western world to validate their unique cultural supremacy and the ingenuity of their society.

They don’t need a puny little contract to manage America’s ports to survive in this world. They don’t need to be the servants of American economic interests. In truth, the belief that the Arab world needs the United States and the West is in effect a form of self-imposed bondage that strangles and smothers Arab freedom and independence.